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A Month of Exploring Earthsea

I did a whirlwind tour of book launch parties tonight, starting with Maureen Johnson’s The Name of the Star event. I ran into Ellen Kushner there and she immediately thrust a booklet into my hands. “Take a look!” she hissed (Maureen was speechifying and we didn’t want to be disruptive). As I turned the pages, she added, “I need to promote the fuck outta this!” I may be misremembering her exact words, but that was the gist.

“This” turned out to be a series of events at the Center for Fiction, celebrating Ursula Le Guin and A Wizard of Earthsea. I saw some familiar names: Kathleen Ann Goonan, Charles Yu, Naomi Novik, Kelly Link, Lev Grossman. Huh, I thought, pretty cool. Then on the next page there were Holly Black and Chris Moriarty and Justine Larbalestier and Margaret Atwood, and on the next page were N.K. Jemisin and Michael Swanwick, and the page after that had Liz Hand and John Crowley and Chip Delany and Andrea Hairston, and I’m going to stop dropping names now but the short version is that just about every cool person ever is going to be doing these events, which take place over the entire month of October. All the details are here. And other than Atwood’s talk, I believe the events are all free of charge.

I promised Ellen I would blog about it. In gratitude she wrote a note expressing her adoration… and asked me to pass it on to Kate Beaton, whose Hark! A Vagrant book launch party I was going to after Maureen’s thing. Messenger to the stars, that’s me.